Creative Variations

Day 1: plotting shapes and values

Cyber follower to real time with artist Myrna Wacknov - I am back from a wonderful week of Myrna Wacknov's workshop "Variations" :)  It was really special to finally meet her after following her blog, admiring her creativity for a few years now! I was immersed in five days of fast paced exploration of creative interpretations of the portrait. Everyone worked with the same instructor provided black and white image and it was amazing to see the 'variations' at the end of each day as each participant chose different design elements to emphasize and brought her own talents, interpretations and style to Myra's instructions, prompts and guidance.

Day-1 was spent designing the shapes of the image with a modified contour drawings, creating a uniform grid for original image and then creating distored grids to reshape the image.We simplified  lines and connected shapes. We then experimented with various value patterns.   At the end of the day we each had atleast one sketch to work on day2 with shape+one other element (roll of dice) and another to work with value+a different design element. She also had 24 combinations of color chords on index cards and luck of the draw determined what colors we would be using. The color chords had Analogous, compliments, triads, spilt compliments to choose from. The seven elements (line, size, shape, direction, color, value and texture), decisons about dominance, relationships (unity, harmony, dominance, contrast, repition, variation, gradation, and balance) was to create a mood for the paintings.

Day 2 AM: Shape+texture

Day 2 AM : Shape:  The roll of dice resulted in texture being the second element for my exercise. The colors in my card were split compliments yellowgreen, red and violet. The textures were a lot of fun to paint - I  sprayed  alcohol, used oil pastels, stencils with paint and some gesso, some colored pencils to create the various textures.

Day2 PM: Value+lines

Day 2 PM : Value:  This time roll of dice for secondary element gave me lines along with complimentary colors yellow and violet. I sketched with masking fluid and incorporated the saved white lines into the design element. I used various yellows and violets to bring out the values in the painting. I had a piece of netting from a potato sack that I dabbed paint over to bring lines in the background. Splattering white liquid acrylic paint with tooth brush gave a cool look for the sunglasses.

Myrna is a treasure trove of ideas. She freely shared her collection of samples,  her paintings, clippings and tips with us throughout the week.  I loved her critiques of all the paintings.  The other participants were all accomplished painters from Potomac Watercolor society and it was a treat to watch them in action.  Myrna Wacknov has posted her demos in her blog . Watch for more postings in my blog and hers.

Reflection of Life

The world is a looking glass...... digital photography by Meera Rao

Art is a Verb

Memories of a bloom 3 watercolor on Yupo 7x5"by Meera Rao 

Memories of a bloom 2 watercolor on Yupo 5x7" by Meera Rao

Memories of a Bloom  watercolor on Yupo  7x5" by Meera Rao

Three paintings so far with the theme: 'Memories of a Bloom.'  I posted all three here just to see how they look as a group. It felt strange to paint #3 just as fresh spring blooms were popping up in the yard! Memories of a Bloom  and Memories of a Bloom2 were painted earlier. Yupo as I have mentioned so many times before, is a great medium to play with to see how to work out compositions, color and values without much hesitation - it is so easy to wipe off part or all of the painting and start over when things don't quite work out!  And as I rework my paintings I see that there is much truth in the quote from one of my favorite books - Art and Fear - Observations On the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking by David Bayles and Ted Orland : “To the critic, art is a noun. To the artist, art is a verb.”  

As promised in an earlier post, it is time to tag blogs for the Liebester Award which Aparna from Warli Soul generously passed on to me. Liebster is German for dearest, beloved or favorite. This award is bestowed on blogs with less than 200 followers but deserve more attention :) Please check out these wonderful artists! : 

Rajeev Mohan's Spalsh of Color  

Lisa Graham's Lisa Graham Art

Kathy Staicer at Katsart

Nanas - Excellent Fruit

Pineapple watercolor on yupo 6x8" by Meera Rao

I bought a pineapple last week and it sat on the counter for a few days ripening slowly.  I sketched it in graphite first and then in watercolors. It took a lot longer to do the detailed pencil sketching than the paintings as I didn't do any pencil drawing of the fruit for either of the watercolor pineapple paintings.  I used waterbrush pens for the smaller pineapple. I think sketching them in pencil and then with the waterbrush pen was definitely good practice- by the time I painted it on yupo I was familiar enough with the fruit. But I guess no sketching ahead may also explain why it is a little plumper in this version :)  I also experimented by misting the yupo painting with alcohol to get the texture. 

watercolor sketch with waterbrush pen 5x3" 

We call pineapple as ananas in my mother tongue Kannada.  I just found out that "In the scientific binomial Ananas comosus, ananas, the original name of the fruit, comes from the Tupi word nanas, meaning "excellent fruit",[8] as recorded by André Thevet in 1555, and comosus, "tufted", refers to the stem of the fruit."  Tupi is one of the languages from South America and the pineapple plant is indigenous to that area.  I am sure, even though I am not aware of it, there is an interesting story as to how the fruit with it's name came to be a familiar crop all the way in southern India :) 

graphite sketches 5x3"

Winter Abundance

Winter Abundance digital photography by Meera Rao 

I saw these berries weighing down the holly tree branch on my walk last week. For some reason the birds have not found that tree yet.  I understand cold winter frost makes the otherwise poisonous berries edible for the birds. 

Taking the photographs often is a lesson or practice sessions for me in how to compose, to get closer look at vast range in colors, light-shadow and variety of textures.  Sometimes I wonder though whether the camera makes me lazy about really paying attention to all that because  now I can just go back and refer the photos whenever I have a doubt, erasing a compelling reason to really observe for long or commit to memory much of the details......  

My curiosity lead me to research how and in what way photography changed paintings, in style and subject matter.  I came across some very interesting information in an article 'Painting and Photography'  written by Nancy Roth for Answers.com. : Photography arrived at a point in the history of European painting when Romanticism, as embodied in the turbulent fictions and exotic allegories of figures such as Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863), was widely admired and commercially successful; realism, the painting of immediate visual experience, was beginning to coalesce into an oppositional movement, championed by the brash young Gustave Courbet (1819-77). Neither of these painters saw photography as a threat to painting. They, and others later, quickly embraced it as a means of referencing such details as facial expression, ephemeral light effects, and motion. Delacroix even wrote in his journal that ‘if a man of genius should use the daguerreotype as it ought to be used, he will raise himself to heights unknown to us’. Some painters, notably Edgar Degas, Pierre Bonnard, Edvard Munch, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, themselves became accomplished photographers. It was rather the popular Salon painter Paul Delaroche (1797-1856), celebrated for the technical precision of his work, who reportedly declared, on seeing his first daguerreotype, "From today painting is dead "   

I am so glad he was wrong :) 

The Power of Choice

Garuda Puppet  watermedia  22x30

So how long does it take me to complete a painting? - I started Garuda fifteen some years ago at the very first workshop I had signed up for.  We went to an antique shop and I sketched an Indonesian puppet in pen on a full sheet of Arches watercolor paper! Each participant then picked three colors from a basket to use as underpainting.  I ended up with Opera, Phthalo(more like acid)green and Aureolin yellow :)  Too meek to protest or cheat with tamer colors, I tried to do my best by really diluting the paints but still ended up with a very garish start. I remember very well trying to save the whites around the face of the puppet! But I never even attempted to complete the piece. Over the years, I could not discard it --the paper was too expensive, and I did not want to admit defeat! 

Yesterday I pulled out the piece. All my reference photos were lost somewhere in my studio. I decided to plunge by boldly covering the space and underpainting behind the puppet with opaque blue gouache. Things already looked better! Except for the face, the arm, and the hands, I glazed the background designs with a thin wash of ultramarine blue --that subdued the colors and pushed it back. I then defined some of the shapes with indigo violet, some with yellow ochre, remembering the  batik textile designs from the Indonesian island of Bali. Feeling a bit adventurous, I defined the eyebrow and the beak with a mix of opera and phthalo green. I finished by glazing the arm with yellow ochre and one last thin glaze of ultramarine blue on everything but the face and arms. I am pretty pleased with the rescue - mainly because I learnt so much in the process! Funny thing is that, all this took about 4 hours! And I really wish I had a 'before' photograph.

This painting session was the exact boost I needed desperately yesterday.  During the past month I had received one too many rejection notices for shows and someone from the artworld even questioned my commitment as an artist. As I thought through my experiences, I suddenly realized how far I had come in the fifteen years and how much I enjoy what I do. And talk about serendipity, I came across the wise words about 'social validation and false merit metric of prestige' at Brainpickings :What you should not do, I think, is worry about the opinion of anyone beyond your friends. You shouldn’t worry about prestige. Prestige is the opinion of the rest of the world.[…]Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like. - (Paul Graham on How to do what You Love). Tucked in the same site, TED talk by Alain de Botton about 'ideological fallacies of success.' was also just what I needed :)

So, I would like to really thank all of you who visit my blog and validate what I do here! I also  especially want to thank Aparna from Warli Soul for the 'Liebester Award' she gave me. Liebster is German for dearest, beloved or favorite. This award is bestowed on blogs with less than 200 followers but deserve more attention (-Serendipity again!) In my next post, I shall pass this along :) Meanwhile, do check out her beautiful 'Warli' art. 

Drama of Color and Texture

Mushrooms 2 watercolor on Yupo 5x7"

I loved painting the drama of color and texture of these mushrooms.  I had painted these mushrooms before  - ( reproduced also below) but I wanted to experiment and play with them again from a slightly different angle.  I tried more stylized repetition of shapes  and more intense hues.  Colors on Yupo dry deeper than on regular watercolor papers when the brush is loaded with straight color but not much water. Pressing with crumpled up tissue, misting with water and letting each layer of paint dry thoroughly before coming back with another layer of transparent paints resulted in the different textures. 

Bursting Colors watercolor on Yupo 5x7"

Last fall finding these mushrooms on one of my walks I had held my small camera close to the ground and taken a few photographs.  It was really fun to dramatically transform the already colorful mushrooms even further :)  

Mushrooms digital photography 

Run Me Out In The Cold Rain And Snow

Out in the Cold Rain and Snow Digital Photography 

“It was a rainy night. It was the myth of a rainy night.” 

― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

PS: I have tried to take away the two word thing on the comment form.  Please let me know if its working! If it is not working could you tell me what/how to do do it so it doesn't show up anymore?

Fascinatingly Beautiful

Orchid  watercolor 5x3" 

As I did a quick sketch of the orchid a few days ago using my water brush pen and sketch kit of limited paints, I vaguely remembered that the orchid varieties in number are almost double that of bird species. I went surfing to see if my recollection was right. 

My memory had served me well and  I also discovered that at 25,000+ species, there are four times more varieties of orchids as that of mammals!  More interesting was that 'the name comes from the Greek ὄρχις (órkhis), literally meaning "testicle", because of the shape of the root.'!  Greeks also thought if would-be fathers ate large new orchid tubers their child would be male and if mothers ate small tubers, the child would be female :)  The flavoring vanilla comes from one genus of Orchid -vanilla(of course). The Aztecs believed vanilla mixed with chocolate gave them great strength. In China however, orchids are a key ingredient in medicines for treating coughs and lung-related illnesses. It is also quite fascinating to read about pollination, propagation and seed production in orchids. Growing up in tropical India, I knew them as beautiful and colorful epiphytes and was fascinated how they grew on trees!  

I have a l wide collection of photos as well as few sketches of orchids and I hope to paint some larger varied flowers soon!

Remembrance, The Lasting Perfume

Memories of a bloom 2 watercolor on Yupo 5x7"

Pleasure is the flower that passes; remembrance, the lasting perfume.  ~Jean de Boufflers

I saw these stalks with dried out flower pods, petals, leaves still attached while on a walk couple of years ago in Colorado.  This painting is the second in the series capturing the memories of that cold crisp morning. I used the same techniques in this painting as in the earlier one.  My plan is to  change or add  one color to each of the painting to give each painting its uniqueness as well as making it a part of the series. They are small paintings but take time to complete since each layer has to dry completely before I lay the next one. You may check out the first painting here. 

Talking about memories I recently came across an article highlighting the fact that memories are not fixed but flexible and can be manipulated very easily: "....memories are surprisingly vulnerable and highly dynamic. In the lab they can be flicked on or dimmed with a simple dose of drugs. “For a hundred years, people thought memory was wired into the brain,” Nader says. “Instead, we find it can be rewired—you can add false information to it, make it stronger, make it weaker, and possibly even make it disappear.” Nader and Brunet are not the only ones to make this observation. One of the scietinsts, Nader further wonders:  "What actually happens when we recall the past? Does the very act of remembering undo what happened? Does a memory have to go through the consolidation process again? " 

A little further the article points out a fascinating point: "While neuroscientists were skeptical of Nader’s findings, cognitive scientists were immediately fascinated that memory might be constantly revamped. It certainly seemed to explain their observations: The home run you hit in Little League? Your first kiss? As you replay these memories, you reawaken and reconsolidate them hundreds of times. Each time, you replace the original with a slightly modified version. Eventually you are not really remembering what happened; you are remembering your story about it. “Reconsolidation suggests that when you use a memory, the one you had originally is no longer valid or maybe no longer accessible,” LeDoux says. “If you take it to the extreme, your memory is only as good as your last memory. The fewer times you use it, the more pristine it is. The more you use it, the more you change it.” We’ve all had the experience of repeating a dramatic story so many times that the events seem dead, as if they came from a novel rather than real life."

So I wonder, how much do I change my memory when I sketch and paint things I encounter?